WrestleMania: Has The Grandest Stage of All Gotten Too Big?

WrestleMania 32

Main Card Length: 4 hours, 51 minutes, 5 seconds

Total Bell to Bell Action, Main Card: 2 hours, 18 minutes, 48 seconds

“Wasted” Time: 2 hours, 33 minutes, 7 seconds

Average Match Length: 13 minutes, 42 seconds

After a pretty good, if not wasteful, WrestleMania 31, WWE came back a year later with a relative dud. Some of the show was pretty good, like the Intercontinental Championship ladder match (but Zack Ryder? really?) and the Women’s Championship triple threat. But an overly predictable and lousy main event was the rotten cherry on top of the pile of meh in Dallas.

Because the show was extended to just about five hours, the waste was a bit more apparent. There was more actual wrestling on the card than at WrestleMania 31 – only 52.5% of the show was devoted to non-wrestling. That number would have been slightly higher, had The Rock not defeated Erick Rowan in a mere six seconds.

Some of the “waste” was understandable – with a Hell in a Cell match on the card, there needed to be time to lower the cell, set up the crash pads for Shane’s dive, and clear away the wreckage after the fact. Still, giving Dwayne Johnson a live mic in 2016 should have been a clear sign that time was about to be wasted – when was the last time The Rock was succinct in a promo?

Surprisingly, there were no real stand-alone musical performances at WrestleMania 32. Besides America the Beautiful before the show, and Snoop Dogg performing Sasha Banks to the ring, nothing.